It has been a remarkable year. As my career has shifted, expanding into new commercial projects and allowing me to work with companies I deeply admire, I have found myself with a gift I haven’t possessed in decades: space. Space to breathe, space to think, and finally, space to open the sketchbooks that I have been writing and drawing in while I built my photography studio and raised my three children.
With my children now starting to step into their own, I’m finding little gaps of time to explore the personal projects that have lived in the back of my mind. One of my great loves is my home, Arizona. I have lived here for thirty years now. While the Southside of Chicago defines my roots and my childhood, Arizona defines my adulthood. It is here that my love of nature stepped into the vast, quiet land of the deserts and mountains where the Saguaros call home.
The Witness on Stoneman Road Trail
Arizona’s Saguaros are witnessing the landscape change. Most of the mature saguaros we see are over one hundred years old. They have stood tall and grown with Arizona while it has changed dramatically. As the urban sprawl continues its fast-paced march across Arizona, I wanted to capture their sacred beauty before it’s too late.
—Portrait of a Saguaro #004—caught my eye during an assignment that was, ironically, about preservation. I was photographing a story for Images of Arizona magazine with the Mayor of Carefree, John Crane. An article focused on preserving the very land this Saguaro stands on: a cross-section of the old Stoneman Road Military Trail in Carefree, Arizona.
The Art of the Portrait
When I photograph a Saguaro, I approach it as a portrait photographer, with the same respect and creativity I would give anyone in front of my camera. I look for their lines—the scars from a frost fifty years ago. For this image, I wanted to capture her in her element, dignified and resilient. The texture of her ribs, the defiant reach of her arms, the way the light played across her weathered shell — it was all deliberate. I wanted to immortalize her as a living, breathing entity that has earned her place on this trail.
Preserving the Quiet Moments
Captured on the Stoneman Road Military Trail, it felt like a dialogue between the past and the present. In a world that is constantly rushing toward the new, there is something profoundly grounding about standing before a living thing that measures its life in centuries, not days with such astounding presence.
This series is about preservation and my creative process in capturing these beautiful treasures of the desert. To hold onto that quiet dignity of the desert before the sprawl wipes it out. My way of listening to their stories, honoring their watch, and acknowledging that while we may live here, they are the ones who truly belong to it.
Loralei Lazurek
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Pink Skies – the science behind an Arizona sunset
The backdrop for this portrait was one of those quintessential Arizona sunsets that seem almost too vivid to be real. There is a reason our skies burn with such intensity here, and it is a marriage of geography and physics.
It comes down to a phenomenon known as Rayleigh scattering. Sunlight contains the full spectrum of colors, but as it passes through the atmosphere, the shorter violet and blue wavelengths are scattered by gas molecules in the air. This is why our daytime sky is blue. However, at sunset, the light has a much longer path to travel through the atmosphere to reach our eyes. Most of the blue light is scattered away completely before we see it, leaving the longer wavelengths—the reds, oranges, and pinks—to pass through.
In the desert, this effect is amplified. We have dry air and microscopic dust particles suspended in the atmosphere—remnants of the day’s heat and wind. These particles scatter the light even further, filtering out the fades and leaving us with deep, saturated crimsons and golds. It is the atmosphere breathing, painting the sky with the dust of the land itself.
